Prof. Lonneke van Der Plas - NLP technologies leadership - USI
Prof. Lonneke van der Plas leads the NLP Lab at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), with PhD students enrolled at USI and EPFL. She has been a leading contributor to the field of natural language processing since 2004, with pioneering work on distributed representations of language and the use of multilingual data to improve vector-based semantic models, particularly in the medical domain.
Her research is strongly interdisciplinary, interfacing linguistics, cognitive science, and the life sciences, and focuses on integrating domain knowledge into machine learning models. She is widely recognised for her work on multi-word expressions and compositionality, multilingual transformer-based language models, and the development and evaluation of foundation models for languages with diverse morphological systems and writing scripts. More recently, her group has contributed to computational creativity, language change, model interpretability, analogical reasoning, and representation analysis in large multilingual transformers.
Within SATURNA, Prof. van der Plas leads the technical alignment and adaptation of NLP technologies, including large language models, for RNA biology. Since 2023, she has applied her expertise in multilingual NLP, interpretability, and relational modelling to RNA-focused AI research, co-supervising a PhD student with Prof. Luisier and Prof. Frossard. This collaboration contributed, among other outcomes, to the Nature roadmap review, and continues to shape how language-model–based technologies are translated into powerful tools for RNA discovery.